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The issue of Myanmar appears to be getting serious enough to threaten the future as well as the cohesiveness of the Association of South East Asian Nations. But should that be a surprise at all? When the Yangon military rulers found themselves accepted in ASEAN, they surely must have had their own agenda at the back of their minds. But what is of greater importance is the fact that the other nations represented in ASEAN actually believed that membership of the body would influence the Myanmar regime into making progress in its national politics. In short, the idea was that as part of ASEAN, the regime would gradually but surely move toward reaching an accommodation with the political opposition led by Aung San Suu Kyi on its home turf. But that has not happened. If anything, membership of ASEAN seems to have instilled a new level of confidence in the regime about its ability to hold on to power. It appears to think that the regional organisation, in view of the many economic factors involved in any interaction with Yangon, will not get too vocal about democracy in the country. That feeling has quite been borne out by the realities of the past many years. ASEAN leaders have been shy about asking the Myanmar authorities to go into initiating democratic change in the country. Resolutions adopted by the body have carefully avoided any reference that could upset the soldiers who have run the show in a country that should have seen democracy take root way back in 1990 when the National League for Democracy overwhelmingly won the general elections.
   All said and done, though, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the failure to exert pressure on Myanmar is now creating conditions where the very future of ASEAN may be coming under a shadow. That is because Yangon is poised to chair the meetings of the organisation in 2006. The only problem (mercifully for those who have always wanted the people of Myanmar to be the arbiters of their fate) here is that the European Union and the United States, both important dialogue partners with ASEAN, have now put their foot down about what they feel about Myanmar’s upcoming stewardship of the organisation. The belated realisation that Aung San Suu Kyi and her politics matter has dawned on the EU and the Americans, to a point where it has made the other member states of ASEAN sit up and take notice. From the point of view of politics, the stand adopted by the EU and the US is admirable. They appear to be doing what ASEAN should have done on its own years ago. But what the organisation failed to take note of was the constant battering Myanmar’s pro-democracy activists were subjected to by the regime. There was little or no effort made to convince the military rulers about the imperative of a dialogue with the leader of the democracy movement. Indeed, her endless confinement by the authorities in clear defiance of ethics and human rights was embarrassingly overlooked by the body. That should not have been the way to deal with the country. It would have done whole swathes of people in Asia proud if ASEAN had been the instrument in a transformation of politics in Myanmar.
   The expectation is there that the pressure brought to bear on Myanmar, through ASEAN, by the EU and the US will lead to productive results. In an era of emerging democracies, it is not right that a historically vibrant nation as Myanmar has been miss out on new ideas.

Egypt’s tragedy

The murder of as many as eighty eight people in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh exemplifies once more the terrible hold that the forces of darkness have taken of our world. In broad measure, the killings are proof that the violence that began with the tragedy of 11 September 2001 and culminated in the absolutely unjustified invasion of Iraq by American and British forces in 2003 has only taken newer dimensions in the past two years. Those who have gone around promoting suicide killings through the murder of innocent people in such places as Madrid, Bali, London and now Sharm el Sheikh have clearly embraced the belief that their methods are the only ones that can force the world’s powerful nations to their knees. For their part, the argument which men in Washington and London have always made, that terrorists have been working to destabilise life everywhere, is surely true. But what cannot at the same time be ignored is that much of the violence we observe around us today has been spawned by all the things that have gone wrong in Iraq.
   There is, in light of the darkness that one notices falling across increasingly bigger swathes of the globe, a need today for policy makers in the West — and we particularly mean the United States and Britain — to rethink policy. Sooner or later, it should be for President Bush and Prime Minister Blair to consider the options before them, one of which is to have their troops go back home from Iraq. While there is no guarantee that such a move will take Iraq back to normal (it is a devastated country today with nearly everyone out to grab what he can out of the mess), it will be a significant way of defusing the militancy that has been cropping up everywhere. We condemn, as we have always condemned, those who make targets of innocent civilians. Terrorism, we believe fully and unequivocally, is an evil that needs to be defeated at the earliest. At the same time, we think that the time has come for leaders in the West to tone down their hubris somewhat and acknowledge that a good deal of the terror we have been through in the last couple of years has been a direct result of the flawed policies they have pursued in places like Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.
   Our prayers go out to the families of those killed in Egypt. Our hope is that the perpetrators or planners of this dark deed will be brought to justice soon.

It is a world of fear, huge, increasingly awesome shades of fear we inhabit in these times. And that fear is doing to us what fear always has done, throughout history. It is teaching us how not to trust people, our own or those removed geographically and culturally from us. The police in London fear men who move around with rucksacks. And the young men who move all over town with rucksacks are today cowed by the fear that they may be putting themselves within range of the police. There is that shoot-to-kill policy, a method of politics that has already claimed the life of an innocent Brazilian in Stockwell. Read that in conjunction with the fear that devastated Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt on the weekend. When you hear of eighty eight people dying for reasons that neither you nor anyone else can explain, you become conscious of the new, terrible realities around you. The global village that people talked so eloquently about throughout the 1990s has turned out to be a misnomer, an idea stillborn. People the world over are yet primitive in the ways they deal with men and women whose complexion, geography and political beliefs do not coincide with their own.
   There are ample reasons to think that fear, while it is a timeless affair, is also the creation of men who should have known better. In the 1930s, imperial Japan suffered from hubris and on that basis went into the terrible business of mauling Chinese and Koreans. Japan’s leaders and soldiers thought they were doing a fine job even as their methods left millions dead and millions upon millions more wounded grievously for all time. You could go further back in time. But what would be the point of that? The universe itself arose out of the darkness that was fear. The beginning of life is always a fearful happenstance and the end of it only renews the old fears. When religion and smug men remind you, to your intense discomfiture, that people are emblematic of the best that God does for himself and for the universal scheme of things He has shaped, you are somehow not convinced. Dogs do not murder dogs. A cat will not take the life of another cat. A rat will not run its fellow rat out of the cellar they have inhabited for ages. But men have killed and will kill other men in all the ingenuity they can muster. And yet you hear men praise themselves loftily to the heavens, tell themselves happily that they are not part of the animal world. The absurdity of it all reaches a climax when you remember all the millions who have been killed by a handful of men because they had the power to eliminate men and women they disapproved of. In the two world wars, in Korea and Vietnam and Bangladesh, rapacious men have gone around spreading fear. A million, perhaps more, died in Cambodia because the Khmer Rouge wished to go back in time. In Burma, tribes of frightened people scurry from bush to bush because of their very legitimate belief that the soldiers of the state military will simply mow them down.
   Fear, then, is what the powerful men around us create at all times. What you call strong leadership is often the ability of men on the perches of power to handle the world at their own will. Fear was a weapon the Taliban employed, in prehistoric fashion, all across Afghanistan for years until the Americans came along and ran them out of town. But have the Americans done any better? You recall the Qalai Jangi massacre and you recall the bombs that have destroyed wedding celebrations. You wonder if the powers of the Oval Office are not being used to keep up in people’s minds the ancient notions of fear being the means of holding on to or exercising power. No one in the United States has ever seen anything wrong with Harry Truman’s decision to bomb the Japanese into submission just as the Second World War neared the end. That move was intended to drill fear into the Japanese and into people all around the world. War has for ever been a means of instilling fear in people. Those atomic bombs were weapons of fear. Suddenly it was a new, more destructive age for nations. War was no more to be fought in the old ways. And fear had taken a newer dimension. A single bomb could destroy all evidence that people once inhabited a locality, a town, a city. It was fear of the kind that was to proliferate in time. Today, as the world worries about nuclear weapons in North Korea, about India and Pakistan resorting to nuclear war in an unguarded moment, we understand the nature of fear in our times. You might say that when the moments of darkness come upon us, the voices of sanity and of reason will prevail. Maybe they will. But what guarantee is there that they will? A whole world knew of George W. Bush’s determination to destroy Saddam Hussein despite there being an absence of evidence of the WMDs. He and his friend Tony Blair did not find any of these weapons. And yet Iraq was invaded. In the process of destroying the president of Iraq, they have reduced Iraq to rubble. It does not matter that 100,000 or 25,000 Iraqis have died in Iraq since the launch of the invasion in 2003. What matters is that their end has come through fear. But much more important than the ultimate tragedy is the tale of how people were given a taste of fear before the actual destruction of towns and homes. Precision bombings wreaked havoc on Belgrade and Baghdad in the Clinton years; in the Bush years, it was again Baghdad that was softened up by nocturnal bombings before the conquerors actually went in.
   There was a different kind of fear in the era of the Cold War. In October 1962, people waited in trepidation for President Kennedy and Prime Minister Khrushchev to push the nuclear button and ignite a horrendous nuclear fire all over. A last-minute deal, over American missiles in Turkey and Soviet missiles in Cuba, postponed fear from taking real shape. When in 1968, Alexander Dubcek launched Prague Spring, it was the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies which experienced the old fear, one that had rocked their world in 1956 when Hungary’s Imre Nagy stepped out of line. To suppress that rising fear, Moscow and its friends sent their tanks in the misty light of dawn into Prague and crushed what they saw as an anti-socialist uprising. Fear crept back into the lives of a people who had thought their courage was invincible. If fear is the means by which hideous men do politics, there have been whole tranches of it in Indonesia. General Suharto and his army successfully murdered as many as a million Indonesians for no reason other than that they were communists or suspected communists. Travel to Jakarta and ask a survivor, one who has lived through that state of fear, about September 1965 and its aftermath. He will recoil from a new fear, that of remembering a long darkness. Not even Subandrio, the foreign minister who spent decades in prison after the Suharto coup, will say a word. A basic facet of modern history, or any history for that matter, is that people tremble in fear decades after they have gone through it. The human mind is often subject to things that make cowards of us all. The people of East Timor have known how bitter and frightening it is to remember darkness. They have all lived through occupation and then a torching of their land because they desired to be a free people.
   In these fraught times, Muslims are afraid that the West will scapegoat them over the acts of their more extremist brothers in faith. There is fear welling up in the Muslim man or woman who alights at New York’s JFK airport, for he or she is not sure if the immigration there will permit him or her to set foot in the country. Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam, and Zaki Badawi have been turned away. There was fear in those who told them they were not welcome. The fear was unfounded and yet there are Americans who cannot and will not forget the fears they went through on 11 September 2001. The commuter in Madrid will for the rest of her life board a train in fear because she will remember March 2004. What you see in London today is a city made silent by fear. Ordinary Londoners, across cultural and religious divides, are worried and afraid. Fear stalks them on the streets. The Muslim who goes around holding fast to his religious dress code knows that he is an object of suspicion everywhere. And the good, secular Muslims know fear as well, just as the policemen on the many beats all over London and Leeds do. Fear only spawns newer fears. No fear is more dangerous than that epitomised by one who is willing to die even as he takes others down with him. Our world of fear today is essentially what the suicide killer wishes to make of it. You cannot bring him to justice because he dies along with his victims. The suicide killer puts presidents and prime ministers on the spot. These powerful men are made vulnerable by these desperate young people willing to blow themselves up, from a false sense of faith. What greater fear can there be for us than to come in the way of these psychopaths?
   E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk